Category: Laptops / Notebooks
SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: Asus Eee PC 1000HE
Netbook fan? Me too! That’s why I was dead excited to try out the latest Eee, and you know what? It’s a bit of a monster. Montrously powerful, by netbook standards, and with a montrous battery life.
Unfortunately it’s also monstrously heavy, weighing in at 1.4kg. I suppose you have to compromise somewhere, but for £329, you can’t complain too much. Watch the video above for my full thoughts.
Elan isssues multi-touch patent infringement lawsuit against Apple
Apple, who’s lately been telling anyone that’ll listen about how many multi-touch patents it has, must be smarting a little today following the news that it’s on the receiving end of a lawsuit from Elan Microelectronics.
The company, who make the keypads used in Eee PCs, claims infringement on two patents and is seeking an injunction on the sales of the MacBook, iPhone, and iPod Touch. They’re unlikely to get it, but given that they’ve already won a similar injunction on Synaptics on one of the two patents, there’s every chance that Apple might be forced to settle.
(via Engadget)
Acer Aspire One – now in size you can actually type on
With the novelty of finger-cramping netbooks wearing off rapidly, Acer has updated their beautiful Aspire One with 11.6″ version complete with high-definition WXGA LED screen and 160GB HDD.
It’s powered by an Atom CPU and Mobile Intel US15W Express chipset but, despite the increase in screen size, is now just 1″ thick and will only weigh a little over 1kg leaving it nice and portable. The LED screen means there’ll be less of a power drain and now that Acer is offering a 6-cell as standard, they’re claiming up to 8 hours battery life. Nice work if you can get it.
No word on number of USBs etc but it does include LAN, VGA, an all-in-one card reader, multi-gesture touch pad and all your connections in the shape of Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G. Dolby Pro Logic sound plus microphone and webcam rounds off what looks like an excellent contender for the next portable computer to own. The only choice remaining is whether you want it in white, dark blue, red or black.
Acer
SHINY VIDEO PREVIEW: HP Pavilion DV2 12.1" notebook
This week sees the launch of the hotly anticipated, 12.1″, entertainment notebook from HP, the latest in the Pavilion range. We had a glimpse of the DV2 at CES a few months back but nothing beats a closer inspection with Shiny Shiny’s Zara, so here she is for a tour of the £499 piece of computing kit.
It seems to have a good selection of ports and, although the screen isn’t up to HD content, I’m glad to see an HDMI port in case you’d like to strap the thing to your TV for all your downloaded high res programming, of which you’ll have space for up to 500GB. The other option is the external optical drive which can be upgraded to Blu-ray presumably at moderate cost.
Got to say that the whole package looks rather sexy and it’s always good to see trust in an AMD processor. Looking forward to having a play with this one first hand
HP considering Android for forthcoming netbooks
Top laptop manufacturer Hewlett-Packard, or HP, has confirmed that it’s testing out Android as a operating system for forthcoming netbooks. Normally the platform is only used in phones, and at the time of writing there’s only one phone on the market that uses it.
Android can work on netbooks, as Venturebeat proved back in January. They had a little difficulty with graphics drivers, but if a user wasn’t rendering much more than websites then it could be very effective and very cheap – a great solution for the netbook industry.
HP has said that it hasn’t made any decisions yet on whether to offer it or not, but it’ll be interesting to see how they fare with it. Other netbook manufacturers will almost certainly be watching, too.
(via PC World)
Contract laptops to come with kill-switch
A growing trend among phone networks is to start offering netbooks and other low-cost laptops free to customers of their mobile broadband services. What happens, though, if the contract owner stops paying up? They lose kit worth hundreds of pounds that’s still in fully working order.
As a result, LM Ericsson AB, a Swedish company that produces laptop modems, has added a feature to its hardware that can remotely ‘kill’ a laptop, rending it useless. If carriers desire, then they can stop a customer who hasn’t paid up from using his or her machine.
It could also be used to secure lost or stolen machines – locking them down remotely. It’s a nice idea, but I’d be concerned about the risk of these devices malfunctioning, stopping legitimate customers from accessing services that they’ve paid for.
(via Yahoo!)
10" Netbooks go HD with the 720p-capable Dell Mini 10
The world of netbooks has finally made it to high-definition with the announcement from Dell that its Mini 10 netbook is being souped up. Within a week or so, the option to go to a 1366×768 display resolution, which is ample for displaying 720p movies, will be offered.
Best of all, that spec jump will cost just $35 more (£24 or so). Wireless 802.11n will also be offered, alongside Bluetooth 2.1, a speedier processor and more capacious hard drive. You’ll still be stuck with Windows XP and a measly non-upgradable 1GB of RAM, though.
The new specs are available right now in the USA, so a UK launch can’t be far off.
Customisation page (via TrustedReviews)
RUMOUR: MacBook Mini pictures & specs
Some very fishy imagery of a 10.4-inch MacBook Mini is bouncing around the intertubes after publication of the details in a Russian magazine. The two things to bear in my mind before you get too excited are that 1) the images look a little on the artificial side and 2) it is April Fool’s day on Wednesday. That said, indulge your eyes and inner geek:
- 10.4″ WXGA display.
- 1280 x 768 pixel with LED backlighting.
- NVIDIA MCP79
- Intel Atom Z740 1.83GHz with 1MB L2 cache.
- 2GB DDR3-800.
- NVIDIA GeForce 9400M
- 64GB Solid State Drive.
- Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g/n
- 1 x USB 2.0
- 1 x Mini Display Port
- Battery Li-Ion 5100mA
I like the look of the LED backlighting, the connectivity, high-end Atom, good chunk of RAM and the SSD is good enough to me too. What I find suspicious, though, is that that’s exactly what you’d expect. There are no surprises at all and that’s very un-Apple. There’s usually either a glaring omission or a stroke of genius. This MacBook Mini has neither.
If indeed this is true, then the word is $899 some time this year.
(via MacRumours)
Asus plans netbook with optical drive
All the pillars that we once knew as hallmarks of netbookiness are crumbling. Screen sizes now go up to 12.1″, the Atom processor is being seen less and less regularly, solid state drives are rare and now Asus is bringing out a model with an optical drive attached!
The E1004DN will have an optical drive, as well as an Intel Atom N280 CPU paired with GN40 chipset, and a 120GB hard drive. It’ll be out mid-April in Taiwan and will cost NT$18,000-20,000, which is about £375 or so in quids.
(via Digitimes)
GALLERY: Samsung N110, N120, Q320 & R522 notebooks – two minis and two HD
Samsung is flinging out a set of four laptops from their lofty nest next month but they've had the thought to do so in pairs making sure that the little fledglings will not be all alone in the big, bad world.
Two are mini-notebooks and the others are 16:9 HD numbers…
